“Listen to me,” I say loudly. “You have to give me a full account of all your activities. Where you live, what you do, and who you’re doing it with.”
Darryl waves his hand and turns away, like I’m nothing.
“Don’t give me that,” I say. I’m starting to really get pissed off now, with the veins pumping up in my neck. “If you don’t do the right thing, and I find out that you’re doing more shit out there, I’m gonna personally send you to jail. And since it’ll be a violation of probation, you’ll do serious time.”
“Shee-it,” Darryl King says.
“I expect you in here next week at a reasonable hour. Like nine in the morning next Friday would be nice.” I rest my chin on my clenched fist. “I’m telling you now, Darryl. You work with me, I’ll be your best friend. You work against me, I’m gonna come down on you as hard as I can.”
He turns up the left corner of his mouth and tightens his facial muscles. “Anybody ever wasted a probation officer?”
“What?”
“I’m just askin’. You know. ’S just a question,” he says lightly, as though he’s just being philosophical.
“You kill a probation officer and your life is over, okay?” I light a Marlboro and then notice I already have one burning in the ashtray. “That would be murder one …”
I suddenly realize I’m shouting. I’ve never lost my temper like this with a client before. Richard Silver bothered me yesterday, but this is different. This guy is really getting under my skin. The thing is that he knows he’s crossing the line. I have no idea why he’s making it into a personal thing between us. But now I can’t back down. And neither can he.
“Man, don’t try to front on Darryl,” he says violently. “I know what time it is. They save murder one for cops. And if I was still a youthful offender, they wouldn’t say shit, no how. I know the courts. I know ’em better than my lawyers. I could be a cop. I could do that …”
He jumps to his feet, throws his left arm straight out, points his index finger like a gun, and steadies it with his right hand. “MOVE IT—MOVE IT—MOVE IT!” he yells. “THIS IS A FUCKIN’ RAID! GET YOUR BUTT ON THE FLOOR! YOU ALL UNDER ARREST! THAT’S RIGHT, THAT’S RIGHT. FORTY-FOUR MAGNUM FIREPOWER, BABY! NOW SPREAD ’EM. I SAID, SPREAD ’EM, PUSSY! YEAH, YOU LOOKIN’ GOOD. WE GONNA PARTY DOWN. BEND OVER AND SPREAD ’EM. HERE I COME!”
At first I think he’s talking to me, but then I realize he’s off in his own angry world. Light still pours into his eyes, but now nothing shines out. I write a note: “Possibly psychotic.”
“JUST SHUT UP NIGGER! I’M IN CHARGE HERE!” he says, pacing back and forth. “WHAT WE GOT HERE? A coupla dope fiends. Motherfuckin’ crackheads. This place smells like shit. You gotta get some Glade lemon air freshener. I SAID, SIT YOUR ASS DOWN. Yeah, you take her in the back, Jefferson, I’m gonna have me a discussion with this nigger. WHERE’S THE MONEY? JUST SHUT UP. YOU THE PERP, I’M THE COP.” He cocks his head to one side like he’s listening to somebody. “What? Ain’t gonna tell me? Well, CHECK THIS OUT.”
He brings his hands down fast like he’s slamming someone with the gun butt.
“I split your head? I’m sorry, man. I’m really crushed. I think you better tell me.” He clicks, waits, and makes a firing sound. “DAMN! Boy, your arm is all fucked up.”
He waits and then slams the butt down again. I cross out the “possibly” next to “psychotic.”
Darryl grows still and puts a finger to his lips. “Yo, Jefferson,” he calls out in a schoolyard voice. “Yo, this nigger bought it. He’s dead. He bought the fuckin’ farm, man. I dunno … Just chill, awright … This don’t look too good, you know.” He pauses and looks around. “Yo, we gotta make this look like a rip-off or something. Shit … Just take the fuckin’ money on the table. We gotta find us some rope, so we can tie up his hands and feet. Now you go down to the car and get back up some gasoline … Nah, I don’t wanna torch the place. I wanna pour it down his throat. Make it look Colombian an’ shit.” He makes a holstering motion. “The girl? She thirteen? We better waste her too.”
He takes a long pause and then his beeper goes off again.
I can’t think of anything to say. It doesn’t matter if all of this was an account of true events or a performance for my benefit. The feeling is the same either way. Darryl smiles at me once more.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I coulda had me a career in law enforcement.”
He leaves the cubicle a few minutes later. It’s almost eight o’clock and my day is over.
I take out my evaluation sheet and write three more words under Darryl King’s name: “He scares me.”
13
“WHY Y’ALL BEEPING ME when I’m talking to my probation officer?” Darryl King wanted to know.
“How do I know who you’re talking to?” said his sister, Joanna Coleman, looking up from the horoscope chart on her refrigerator. “All I know is that I got business to discuss with you right away.”
She wore a gold cable as big as an arm around her throat. Two brown incense sticks burned on the kitchen table, wafting a sweet, overpowering odor through the room, and there was a “healing” crystal on top of the refrigerator. A pile of self-help and astrology books sat on the counter.
Joanna’s two children, Howard, the six-year-old boy, and LaToya, the five-year-old girl, were running around the cramped apartment like wild Indians. The boy was like a little man. He walked around with a stern expression and his shoulders back, turning his body from side to side as if he was ready for a fight at any angle. The little girl followed him, with her pigtails flapping. She threw her arms over her little brother’s shoulders like she wanted him to give her a ride.
“LaToya, you mind your brother,” her mother warned her. “Else he’ll turn around and smack you one …”
Aaron Williams, the fourteen-year-old with the harelip, sat on the sofa, watching the Mets game on the television. Darryl’s large friend Bobby “House” Kirk sat next to him and a catatonic-looking boy Darryl had never seen before sat on the floor staring at Bobby’s size sixteen sneakers.
“What’s so important?” Darryl asked.
“Him,” his sister, Joanna, said, pointing to the catatonic boy. She said his name was Eddie Johnson and he was sixteen years old. Darryl King glanced over at him. The boy had hair that stood straight up and no physical energy. He was like a piece of furniture. Joanna explained that Eddie Johnson usually woke up at noon every day and sat up in bed about two hours later. By early evening he’d come as far as the front room, where he watched TV until it was time to go to sleep again.
“They think he’s depressed,” said Joanna.
“So what?” Darryl said.
“But he listens good,” his sister told him. “That’s the thing. You say something, he hears it. He never forgets it. He notice everything … Even though he’s a Scorpio …”
Darryl glared at the blank-faced boy on the sofa. Then he clapped his hands in disgust and pivoted away from all of them. “Joanna, I don’t believe you called my beeper for this …”
“So listen, listen, part of the time Eddie live with his sister in the Bronx,” Joanna said, pointing a long red nail at her younger brother. “The rest of the time, he live around here, with his mother. Right next to Pops Osborn.”
She was still after Pops Osborn and all his crack houses. She and her Jamaican boyfriend, Winston, were getting obsessed with killing him and taking over his business, and Joanna had never stopped giving her younger brother shit about blowing the first attempt on Pops’s life.
“You hear what I’m saying?” she asked Darryl. “Eddie here lives in the apartment right across the hall from Pops. He hears when Pops comes in with a guy and when he’s alone. So he can get us into Pops’s place, and you can get another shot at Pops.”
“Oh.” Darryl gave the kid on the sofa a sideways glance. “How you doing?”
“It’s like I said,” his sister told him, picking up her well-thumbed copy of Visualize Success
from the dinner table. From the book’s black cover, the pair of intense blue eyes seemed to be staring right at Darryl.
Eddie continued to stare straight ahead at the television as though he were a zombie. Next to him, Aaron Williams was biting the red cap off a crack vial and pouring the beige chips into a pipe with a Jack Daniel’s label on it.
“So how’d you do with that guy anyway?” Joanna asked her younger brother.
“Who?”
“Your probation officer.”
“Aw, he’s a sucker like that other one,” Darryl said. “But he’s a little younger … a little more … like …” He couldn’t think of the word he wanted. He shook his fist.
“Like energized?” his sister suggested, rolling her hips to a rhythm no one else could hear.
“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Better watch his ass, else he’ll end up like that cop got shot.”
She looked over his shoulder and out the window. The lights from the other buildings in their housing project were shining brightly. LaToya, the little girl, ran up to her mother and buried her face in Joanna’s thigh.
Darryl laughed. “What I did, I made up all this crazy shit to tell the guy. You know, I told him like I was going around like a cop.” He dropped his hands and swung his shoulders in a macho swagger. “Like I bugged out in his office, you know. I told ’im I was like the maniac cop …”
He stomped around the apartment shouting like a madman and waving his hand like a gun. Bobby Kirk and Aaron Williams were almost doubled up with laughter on the couch. The two little kids hid behind chairs as Darryl lurched around. Joanna Coleman frowned and said she thought her brother and his friends were all idiots. Aaron was giggling so hard that he could barely keep his lighter flaring at the crack pipe.
“The guy was sitting there like this,” Darryl said as he imitated his probation officer’s squint. “Then I told him how I was a cop and we was busting in on drug dealers and taking their money and then pouring gasoline down their throats.”
His friends roared with laughter again. This time even Eddie Johnson, the catatonic kid, seemed amused. At least he was paying attention.
Joanna was less impressed. “You told him what?” she said loudly, stuffing her hands in her back pockets.
“I told him like I was a cop…”
“You told him a story about a cop and pouring gasoline down somebody’s throat?”
Darryl grabbed the crack pipe from Aaron, who he felt was taking excessively long draws. “That’s what I just told you.”
“Since when are you smoking that?” his sister asked.
“This is only the second time,” he lied.
“What am I gonna do with you, Darryl? You starting to smoke that shit. You not thinking straight.”
“Shut the fuck up. Why do I take orders from you? What you know?”
“I know you’re stupid to talk about that shit with your probation officer. That’s playing with fire after what you did. You just daring him to catch you now.”
“Nah,” said Darryl, taking a hit off the pipe. The clean strong ether smell filled the room, drowning the incense odor. “I was just fuckin’ around with the guy.”
His sister got up and glared at him with her hands on her hips. “Darryl,” she said, “why didn’t you just tell that man you were behaving and have him leave you alone? What did I tell you about visualizing. You have to think about what happens after you do shit.”
Darryl King didn’t answer. He was busy taking another pull on the pipe. His right arm waved frantically like a drowning man’s as the pulsing surge went through his body. He closed his eyes and raised his brow.
“That’s why you be taking orders from me, Darryl,” his sister said.
14
WALKING DOWN FLATBUSH AVENUE toward Junior’s, where they’re having Tommy Markham’s farewell party, I find I can’t stop thinking about Darryl King.
I’m not sure what it is that bothers me so much about him. Maybe it’s just the wear and tear of the job. I mean, it’s demoralizing enough putting most of these poor bastards through a system that hardly ever helps them or anybody else. But there’s also a matter of macho pride involved. When somebody like Darryl pushes you, you push back.
I try to be a good guy and all, but I’m starting to hate this wimpy social worker image. I’m somebody who barely made it through the two years of Erik Erikson, developmental psychology, and clinical training you need for a graduate degree. And after that, you don’t get many opportunities to swagger around bragging about the job: “Yeah, I listened to that boy’s problem real good. We achieved some fuckin’ empathy!”
Just before I go through the front door of Junior’s, a woman coming out gives me a strange look. I realize I’ve been talking out loud to myself again. I’ve got to try to spend less time alone, or I’m going to turn into one of those guys you cross the street to avoid.
Inside, regular customers sit around the front counter near a glass display case full of cheesecake. Some of the lights are dimmed and an easy-listening radio station plays in the background. Tommy Markham’s farewell party is under way in the section on the right. Jack Pirone is once again holding forth to a group of a dozen P.O.s. around the side tables. Tommy, who is a little guy in his late sixties with a gnome’s face and thick glasses, sits by himself near the back. He has a half-eaten piece of strawberry cheesecake on his plate and a pink party hat on his head with a rubber chin strap. He’s trying to look happy, even though nobody’s paying attention to him.
I sit down next to Tommy and ignore Jack, who is swigging from a bottle of beer as he tells the other officers, “And the last time I saw her, she was giving head to a bunch of Shriners in the elevator!”
“Mr. Tommy Markham,” I say as the guys behind us roar with laughter. “You getting ready to take it easy a while?”
“Oh sure, sure, kid,” Tommy says in a salty little tough guy voice that makes him sound like the sergeant in a foxhole in an old Warner Brothers war movie. “It’s gonna be swell. Just swell.”
It’s always struck me as funny the way Tommy can sound so hard-boiled, yet still be the biggest bleeding heart in the department. I notice, in fact, that somebody has draped a white T-shirt with a picture of a red bleeding heart across the seat next to him. I ask Tommy if it’s one of his going-away presents.
“Oh yeah, yeah,” he says, a forced smile creasing his knobby face. “It’s just the fellas havin’ some fun with me. Y’know, Steve. They’re just havin’ some fun. Y’know. ’Cos they call me a bleeding heart. Y’know. ’Cos I feel sorry for everybody. Y’know. I always say everybody was once somebody’s baby. Y’know what I’m saying, Steve?”
“I know.” I try unsuccessfully to get the attention of a waitress going by.
“Even the guys who killed somebody, Steve. They was somebody’s baby too. Y’know what I mean? I used to go down to the cells to talk to them. I remembered one guy who killed his whole family. He looked at me through those bars and you know what he said, Steve? He said, ‘I need help.’ Y’know. It does something to you inside when you hear stuff like that.”
I put my elbow up on the table. “I know, Tommy.”
I’ve always thought Tommy was a very nice man, but his penchant for repeating trite and obvious things is really irritating. The sad truth is that Tommy is not too bright, and while everybody likes him, almost nobody respects him. Jack and the others are using the gathering more as a union meeting and a drinking session than as a chance to say good-bye.
“So, Tommy, what’re you going to do with yourself now that you’re retiring?” I ask, taking a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and thinking about a stroll over to the cheesecake display.
“I dunno, kid. Y’know …”
“Are you gonna travel?”
“Nah, kid, I was in de merchant marines. I seen the world already.”
“Oh. Do you have family you’re gonna stay with?”
Tommy tries to keep his chin from sagging and his eyes from dropping. “N
ah. I really don’t have much family around, Steve. Y’know. I got a room around the corner from here. That’s where I’m gonna be most of the time.”
I start to get depressed as Tommy explains that he’s actually looking forward to spending the rest of his days in the tiny room. “It’ll give me a chance to catch up on a lot of things,” he says, like he’s trying to convince himself it won’t be so bad. “I gotta catch up on watching television. They got some good programs on now …”
I don’t know. It seems like a frustrating end to an unsatisfying life. I hope I don’t wind up like Tommy. I wonder what, if anything, he has to show for all his years on the job.
“Tommy, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, sure, kid. Fire away. Anything you want.”
“Well, you’ve been a probation officer a long time, right?”
“Long time, Steve. Very long time. Y’know. More than twenty years. Ever since I got outta de merchant marines.”
“Okay.” I put up my hand to interrupt him. “And you’ve seen a lot of clients in that time. Probably thousands of them …”
“Sure, thousands, kid.” Tommy bobs his head up and down furiously like a doll on a car’s dashboard. “Thousands …”
“And a lot of those people were in terrible trouble when you met them, right? Like they’d really messed up their lives. They were really at the end of their rope …”
“Absolutely, kid, absolutely.” With the way he’s bobbing his head, I worry Tommy’s about to sprain his neck.
“So tell me something, Tommy. How many of those people did you really help? I don’t mean giving them bus fare, or getting a summer job for a kid who didn’t commit that serious a crime in the first place. I’m talking about actually turning somebody’s life around. Giving hope to somebody who was in total despair. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Tommy’s head stops bobbing and he gives me a hurt look. “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” he says slowly.
“So I was just wondering what you had to show. Can you name one person who you really helped that way? Did you ever change somebody’s life?”
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